A number of important contacts have been made to advance the “Five for the Family” campaign. This could result in the campaign starting to
generate the essential number of “likes” and “shares” (by the way, you can
“like” only once, but you can “share” as many times as you wish (we would have said
“as you like,” but that would have
been a little confusing.
 |
| Five-Plus for the Family? |
• With respect to the “Five for the Family” campaign, it has slowed down some, but as with anything else good, it
takes time. If you’re waiting around to
see what happens with it, however, you might want to make a special effort to
visit the page and “share” and “like” it.
We have already received contributions on the crowdfunding webpage. The more people know
about this, the better — and the sooner we’ll reach our goal. Remember: it won’t go anywhere without your
help.
• The ESOP Association Conference was
Thursday and Friday of this week, with the awards banquet (where Mid South Building Supply of Springfield, Virginia, won yet another communications award)
on Wednesday night. Senator Bernie
Sanders spoke at the ESOP PAC breakfast and stated his strong commitment to
worker ownership and the ESOP as a way to achieve a more just distribution of
wealth. A number of contacts were made,
especially with respect to assistance in the goals of the Five for the Family
Campaign.
 |
| In 1896 they created jobs. Today we need to create owners. |
• General
Motors has announced that it is going to spend $5.4 billion and create 650 new
jobs. That works out to $8.3 million
per job. Under conservative Capital
Homestead assumptions, $5.4 billion would create more than 770,000 new owners in one year. Assuming a nine-year period to retire the new
owners’ acquisition debt and a very
conservative pre-tax ROI of 15%, Capital Homesteading would on this one deal
alone begin pumping over $800 million
in new consumption demand into the economy every single year within a
decade in a slow-growth economy — and none of it coming from artificial
government stimulus funded by debt or the taxpayer. Now ratchet that up to a more realistic 30%
return and a five-year period to retire the debt in a fast-growth economy, and
within a few years that one transaction would be pouring more than $1.6 billion — yes, billion — into the
economy on the same terms every
single year. That sounds like a
much better deal than 650 measly jobs — and every dollar of it would be backed
by private sector assets, not government debt.
Expand that to the $2 trillion or so new capital formed in both the
public and the private sector in a slow-growth economy, and the budget could be
balanced within ten years of initiating a Capital Homesteading program, and the
booked portion of the national debt eliminated within thirty years.
 |
| Grosscup: "OWN": Ownership for Workers Now! |
• Probably because of the “long lost”
speech from 1907 by Judge Peter S. Grosscup that our Justice University History Department has been posting (and which
is scheduled to end on Monday), we got more visits to this blog on both days of
last weekend than we’ve been averaging on the weekdays . . . which suggests that a more structured JU webinar or class on Grosscup might be well received. Maybe we should consider putting the entire
speech on .pdf and giving it out as a premium to anyone who contributes to the “Five for the Family” campaign.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 57 different countries and 47 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Kenya, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “The Purpose of Production,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green Mother
from Outer Space,” “Knute Rockne and Social Justice,” and “The Great Sprawlmart
Conspiracy.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that
we know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next
“issue.” If you have a short (250-400
word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog —
do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#